We went for a walk for the first time two weeks. Can you say cabin fever? Roger tweaked his back last weekend after shoveling a week's worth of snow from the driveway. Sunday was the first time he felt well enough to go out for a walk, and it coincided with one of those blue-sky days that simply takes your breath away. There is nothing like the blue of Sierra skies. Deep and endless.
On the Cascade ditch trail (it's a 4 mile round-trip), we got to see our first American Dipper. Unfortunately, most of the trail is in the dark woods and I couldn't take a shot without shaking the camera, while the shutter was still open for letting in whatever available light there was. I did get a very blurry and unusable shot of North America's only aquatic songbird. It surprised us that it was dipping into the human-made irrigation ditch, but it was. Interestingly, when we first started down the trail on Sunday, I wondered if American Dippers ever came to irrigation ditches. I love an answer right away, don't you?
We took the trail down to this turn-around, the big irrigation pipe that connects one ditch to another. Usually we walk the little steel walkway that runs along the side of the pipe, just to add a little bit more to the journey, but on Sunday in the interest of Roger's back, we stopped here to turn around. But before we could head back, we heard this rap rap rapping. We couldn't figure out what the sound was until we saw the crow (or RAVEN?) standing on the pipe. We stood and watched a while, enjoying the new sound. Have you ever heard this before? We hadn't, and we thought it was very cool.
